Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: BeerDrinkingBurke on July 30, 2023, 11:34:19 AM
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Given the recent events in the U.S., I was wondering if anybody would like to discuss the UFO rabbit hole. Specifically, the nature of collective unusual beliefs that unidentified aerial phenomena are technical craft piloted by non-human intelligence (NHI).
There is a whole host of other associated beliefs or claims that form a kind of ecosystem. Here's a few examples in no particular order...
- Governments around the world are conspiring to hide the existence of aliens from the public (since the 1930s).
- Governments around the world are conspiring -with- the aliens for nefarious purposes (a possible takeover).
- Aliens have visited Earth since ancient times and had contact with ancient civilizations (Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F)).
- Aliens are abducting people and conducting experiments on them.
- Aliens have mixed their DNA with people (Starseeds) (https://theconversation.com/starseeds-psychologists-on-why-some-people-think-theyre-aliens-living-on-earth-197291).
- Aliens can communicate with people telepathically.
- There is a factional war going on behind the scenes to try and bring the truth to the public (known as 'disclosure').
And so on.
I think most of these theories have been presented in the X-Files. It's a bit like the approach that Deus Ex took with conspiracy theories in general (assume they are all true). So, it works as a pretty good smorgasbord of every major UFO theory.
I'm interested in understanding more about how such ideas have spread, historically, and what kinds of general psychological theories or principles might help to understand this phenomenon of belief in non-Human intelligence (NHI) visiting Earth.
A few working assumptions...
1. UFOs / UAPs are real -unidentified- phenomena. Some small number of these phenomena cannot currently be explained and are genuine mysteries.
2. We can believe the accounts given by many individuals who have witnessed such UFOs / UAPs (pilots, military and civilian). By this I mean, we can believe that they had the experiences they claimed to have. But with the important proviso that "experience" always includes a psychological component (interpretation), or is even produced by the subconscious (hallucinations, projections). At some point, the distinction becomes a bit blurry. "To see is to believe", yet "there is more to seeing than meets the eye (ball)".
3. We can deploy Occam's razor to explain the social phenomenon of widespread belief in NHI visiting Earth. That is:
- The psychosocial UFO hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosocial_UFO_hypothesis)is capable of explaining the phenomenon of widespread belief.
- This hypothesis is significantly more simple and (logically?) likely than the alternative that NHI actually are visiting Earth.
- Therefore, we should opt to go along with this hypothesis.
I'll start with a few handy links to get you into the topic if you need to get up to speed.
Digging Into the Mythos (Ongoing)
The Vril Society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vril) (Mythos - Nazism)
The Roswell Incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident)
Project Sign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sign)
The 1952 Washington DC UFO Incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C.,_UFO_incident)
Barney and Betty Hill Incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_and_Betty_Hill_incident)
The recent hullabaloo...
We start with the Pentagon UFO Files (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos) (2020).
UFO & UAP 'Need to Know' News Documentary with Coulthart & Zabel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSZUBulON6I&t=2120s) (August 2022).
The Article by Leslie Keen for the Debrief (https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-retrieved-non-human-craft/) (June 5th).
News Nation interview of David Grush by Ross Coulthar (https://youtu.be/8kTU95JxvXE) (12th of June).
Ezra Klein interviews Leslie Kean. (https://youtu.be/hjAyxA4sI1k) (20th June).
The House Oversight's national security subcommittee hearing (https://www.youtube.com/live/SNgoul4vyDM?feature=share) (26th of July).
Post-Hearing Roundtable (https://youtu.be/vUnKRknLVSA)
A skeptics review of the Grusch interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvhMMhW-JN0&t=480s&ab_channel=MickWest).
Some reporting on Elizondo's promotion of the UFO story, and his connection to Harry Reid (https://nypost.com/2023/03/21/ufo-believing-pentagon-bosses-missed-spy-craft-for-years/)
A skeptics review of the hearing (https://youtu.be/EDyZvv3D3ws)
And then, we have some interesting discussions of the subject from a psychosocial perspective.
Carl Jung on Flying Saucers. (https://archive.org/details/carl-jung-flying-saucers-a-modern-myth-of-things-seen-in-the-skies-0_202012/page/n15/mode/2up?view=theater)
A Skeptoid investigation of the 1994 Ruwa Zimbabwe Alien Encounter (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/The 1994 Ruwa Zimbabwe Alien Encounter) (Garry Nolan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Nolan) seems to think this incident is one of the most convincing of UFO encounters. Yet there is quite a lot of evidence against taking it seriously.)
This article on the popularity of the 'Starseed' idea (https://theconversation.com/starseeds-psychologists-on-why-some-people-think-theyre-aliens-living-on-earth-197291) goes into the Forer effect.
Why We Want to Believe in Aliens (https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/why-we-want-to-believe-in-aliens/) (Apparently, people believe in aliens are less likely to believe in religion. This points to a common connection: The desire for meaning.)
Exploring the Psychology of Belief (https://medium.com/illumination/ufos-aliens-exploring-the-psychology-behind-our-beliefs-eca4b7c433b8).
Mental Health and the Paranormal (https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=ijts-transpersonalstudies).
The relationship between schizotypal facets and conspiracist beliefs via cognitive processes (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165178117312301)
A relevant book by Mick West: Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect
(https://www.amazon.com.au/Escaping-Rabbit-Hole-Mick-West/dp/1510735801)
Finally... with respects to the 'social' part of 'psychosocial', I think we cannot ignore very real attempts at 'social engineering' with respects to unusual beliefs. Here there is seemingly quite a bit of documentation of CIA involvement (https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1684324789161189377.html) over the years.
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OK, I'm going to take a left turn now, and kick this off with a comparison with my own recent experience of mental illness. Namely, severe health anxiety.
I'm currently getting assessed for ADHD, and I think one of the issues it poses for me is periods of fixation on subjects. This is quite helpful at times. I can get up to speed on complex stuff pretty quickly because I want to 'figure it out' / problem solve, but it can also put you at risk of stuff like health anxiety. Actually, I think maybe on some level I'm engaging with this subject as a way of sublimating my fascination with the recent hearings, so that it goes in a more healthy direction. ;-) But I want to talk a bit about my experiences here, because I think there are some general links to be made with unusual beliefs / NHI beliefs, and you might find it illuminating. Regardless of if we are more on the extreme side when it comes to focus / fixation on problems, we can say in general that human beings are good at finding patterns in phenomena, and 'reading into' things. In fact, our very beliefs can shape our experiences in fundamental ways (physical, psychological).
So, how my health anxiety played out was a bit like this...
1. Experience of illness in the family (my partner, my mum, myself) got me feeling vulnerable. An environmental factor.
2. I was worried about the threat posed by Covid (long covid in particular, as I am asthmatic). I spent a lot of time reading about it online. An initial trigger.
3. I developed physical symptoms of illness (chest pain, palpitations, heart burn). Manifestation of concern.
4. I got those symptoms investigated (increasing feeling vulnerable). I became fixated with the idea that there was something wrong with me (due to my very real, physical symptoms). Investigation / fixation.
5. More symptoms emerged (vision issues, dizziness, tingling). Manifestation of concern.
6. I got those symptoms investigated (increasing feeling vulnerable). Investigation / fixation.
7. The spiral continues.
And so on. Eventually, I ended up with my eyes not functioning at all (keeping them closed all the time, unable to comfortably focus them on things or risk real migraines), and severe hearing sensitivity, that kept me house bound for four months. My visual symptoms (pattern sensitivity, photo-sensitivity) were real enough that a neurologically trained optometrist diagnosed me with symptoms of head trauma induced post-traumatic vision syndrome (maybe from a virus). A diagnostic physician could think of no connection between my heart issues or my vision issues. I should note that I myself was very careful to spend no time googling my symptoms (having learnt that lesson in the past from pointlessly worrying about something). Eventually I was able to see a neurologist, who was able to give me a diagnosis that a GP should have given me many months earlier - it was all generated by anxiety. My very real, physical symptoms were generated by my nervous system stressing out different parts of my body / brain. Within a few short weeks I made substantial recovery, with my vision working more or less fine (still can't play PC games but...) and my hearing sensitivity recovered to normal levels.
OK, so let's now imagine a hypothetical person with beliefs in NHI.
1. Experience of loss of meaning (lack of community connection / neo-liberalism.) An environmental factor.
2. Become interested in mysterious stories about UFOs in the media or online. Then algorithms feed them endless videos. Or they hunt out articles or books themselves. An initial trigger.
3. They then witness seeing something strange in the sky, and can't explain it. Or perhaps have an abduction 'experience.' Manifestation of concern.
4. They start to investigate this experience, reading more about NHI / UFOs. Investigation / fixation.
5. They then start to notice even more strange things that don't quite 'make sense' about the government, or other people's experiences. Manifestation of concern.
6. So they investigate even more.... Investigation / fixation.
7. The spiral continues.
This might be a bit of a simplification and a stretch at the same time, giving both a health anxiety (HA below) experience and unusual beliefs (AB) the same number of steps / bullet points. But what I am trying to draw attention to with this framework is the significant similarities, rather than trying to claim they are different versions of exactly the same thing.
The similarities are...
1. Both HA and UB are preconfigured by what we might loosely call underlying 'environmental factors.' Experiences people have that make them more vulnerable to each.
2. Both HA and UB are then gradually entered into by triggering events like a global pandemic / experiences of illness, or stories about UFOs, etc.
3. Both HA and UB are capable of generating manifestations of the concern, in the form of real physical symptoms, or perceptions of the things obsessed about.
4. Both HA and UB have a cycle, where the manifestations trigger more investigation.
5. Then the investigations trigger more manifestation....
6. And the manifestation triggers more investigation...
7. The spiral continues.
So, although I am sure there are many differences, I think at their respective cores, each exhibits a kind of feedback loop.
This loop is something we become vulnerable to because of other circumstances. With respects to unusual beliefs regarding aliens or conspiracies, it's surely no coincidence that it is predominantly white middle aged or older men in the U.S. / England / Australia etc. who start to develop them the most. We have seen this with Q-Anon and Facebook. These are the kinds of people who are probably more socially isolated, more in need of community / more feeling the sting of a loss of status due to economic / social changes. I would be interested in hearing of any kind of comparative studies of other countries / genders etc. My impression is that this is (for now) a far less common problem in places like China, where there is still more social cohesion, and opportunities for a sense of meaning derived from family life etc. I wouldn't want to essentialize that as some inherent element of Chinese culture (although I think there are quite deeply ingrained social elements at play there). It is probably more to do with differences in the experience of modernization and the atomization of family / breakdown of traditional communities etc.
What I'm particularly interested in though from here is the manifestation stage. Looking at the recent hullabaloo, I think a common story (Garry Nolan, Zabel, etc.) is some early life experience of UFOs as a child. I assume that in each case the individuals had some kind of exposure to stories about UFOs, which helped to manifest their experiences subconsciously, even if at the time they didn't know what those experiences were. They only rationally reflected upon them later and identified them as UFO / Alien encounters. The fact that these were subconscious manifestations is what then made them feel even more convincing. So for example, Garry Nolan (or was it Zabel?) experienced seeing strange people in his room as a child. He didn't know what to think of it, and forgot about it. Later, as an adult, he saw the cover of the book Communion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communion_(book))in a second hand book store. He recalls dropping the book in shock, as he recognized the 'Grey' alien on the front cover as looking exactly like the strange people he saw in his childhood experience. I think we can easily appreciate how this subconscious / conscious gap led him to becoming utterly convinced that aliens were real, and were on Earth. After all, from his experience, he had no conscious awareness of the grey alien concept at all when he first had that experience. The seemingly 'logical' conclusion was that the experience was real, and hence, the aliens are real. Some deeper, psychologically informed consideration could raise alternatives. 1. That he had seen images of such aliens as a child, forgot about it, and then had the experience without knowing what it was. 2. Perhaps when he saw the image, his mind made the connection with that childhood experience, and 'filled in the blanks' such that he re-remembered in a new way (a bit like dejavu).
Another interesting comparison here is with respects to credibility. Until the very end, when I finally saw my neurologist, at no point in my health anxiety journey did any doctor suggest that my issues may have been caused by anxiety. This includes multiple GPs, a neurological optometrist, a diagnostic physician, an endocrinologist, a gastroenterologist, and a cardiologist. In fact, I myself suggested it to a GP but they thought it unlikely. People tend to think that somebody must be outwardly exhibiting symptoms of hypochondria in order to have health anxiety. There are also probably social biases at play with respects to things like gender. Women often report that their illnesses are blown off as anxiety by doctors. Yet here I was, a man with anxiety, and every doctor I saw treated me as though I was actually ill! We can consider this from the perspective of believers in NHI. They might seem very persuasive, rational, and even skeptical towards their own experiences. Some profess that they never had any interest in UFOs, and were not 'UFO guys'. They simply have had very unusual experiences that they wanted to relay to the public out of a sense of duty / honesty. Because people expect those who have had unusual experiences to exhibit obvious symptoms of fixation, and because we tend to give a lot of credence to older white men with official jobs like pilots (or immunologists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Nolan)), many people with psychological issues may strike us as 'credible'. This in turn can then draw in more people who were previously on the fence, and turn them into 'believers'.
Well, these are my thoughts so far. I have not yet read much of the Jung paper. I'll do that over the coming days and share some of the juicy parts.
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This sounds plausible to me! Psychology oddly enough really never was my area: I always found how societies work fascinating, but I've never done so much on the individual side. Possibly I don't want to stare at my own too hard!
I think the question of what we mean by community and how that interacts with information environments is the bit that most interests me. Clearly in a sense some people find community around conspiracist beliefs, and existing communities can be utilised as ways of spreading false information too (e.g. correlations around some US churches and people not believing that Biden won the 2020 election). So I think there are some interesting questions where beliefs end up stemming from meaning breakdown as you describe but also pass through existing communities and signifiers in ways that can reinforce them? I don't know, this isn't a very well formed thought, but I think there's something there.
I found the discussion of your symptoms interesting, too, as someone who suffers from chronic stress-related problems that manifest very physically (especially psoriasis which affects my skin and joints, and chronic gut issues). It is difficult not to worry about symptoms I have and go into some of those spirals, sometimes, even though if I could just not stress then I'd feel better and therefore probably be less stressed. But then one all too easily ends up stressing about not stressing...
Anyway none of that precisely involved aliens, but maybe I'll have more thoughts on those soon too :)
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I think the question of what we mean by community and how that interacts with information environments is the bit that most interests me. Clearly in a sense some people find community around conspiracist beliefs, and existing communities can be utilised as ways of spreading false information too (e.g. correlations around some US churches and people not believing that Biden won the 2020 election). So I think there are some interesting questions where beliefs end up stemming from meaning breakdown as you describe but also pass through existing communities and signifiers in ways that can reinforce them? I don't know, this isn't a very well formed thought, but I think there's something there.
I wonder if the idea of "myth" is helpful here. This is something I'd love to look at more. It's also what Jung seems to be getting at (https://archive.org/details/carl-jung-flying-saucers-a-modern-myth-of-things-seen-in-the-skies-0_202012/page/n17/mode/2up?view=theater).
As one can see from all this, the observation and interpretation of Ufos have already led to the formation of a regular legend. Quite apart from the thousands of newspaper reports and articles there is now a whole literature on the subject, some of it humbug, some of it serious. The Ufos themselves, however, do not appear to have been impressed; as the latest observations show, they continue their way undeterred. Be that as it may, one thing is certain: they have become a living myth. We have here a golden opportunity of seeing how a legend is formed, and how in a difficult and dark time for humanity a miraculous tale grows up of an attempted intervention by extra-terrestrial “heavenly” powers — and this at the very time when human fantasy is seriously considering the possibility of space travel and of visiting or even invading other planets. We on our side want to fly to the moon or to Mars, and on their side the inhabitants of other planets in our system, or even of the fixed stars, want to fly to us. We at least are conscious of our space-conquering aspirations, but that a corresponding extra-terrestrial tendency exists is a purely mythological conjecture, 1.e., a projection.
I'm currently listening to a podcast called the UFO Rabbit Hole (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r0hSwiHbsw). From what I've listened to so far, the person producing it is a scientifically minded believer. Her episode on the emergence of UFO lore is fairly interesting so far. As well as mentioning the above book and quote by Jung (Note: only got to this point of the podcast after I had posted this quote) She mentions a book called American Cosmic (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44031681-american-cosmic) that looks like it might be quite decent.
Here's the blurb.
More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. American Cosmic examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system that is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, D.W. Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media like The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the believability lent to that media by the search for planets that might support life. American Cosmic explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences, and argues that media is replacing religion as a cultural authority that offers believers answers about non-human intelligent life.
Although the podcast producer is a believer, following (I assume) the lead of this book, she makes an interesting connection between the emergence of UFO lore in the 1940s and the major intellectual / spiritual shifts that took place in the centuries leading up to it. Particularly the 19th century and the rise of positivism / scientism. Another way of putting it maybe is simply a crisis of meaning (as we see discussed by major figures of continental philosophy like Husserl, but as was already recognized as being on the way by Neitzsche). Many have lost the ability to believe any more in a personal God that intervenes in our affairs. We no longer have these cultural bulwarks of meaning. And instead we have some trying to turn science into a God as the ultimate arbiter of reality / truth. It is here that we see the beginnings of the UFO mythos. It offers a branch to the drowning. There is something "out there". Something beyond. The "truth" is in the skies once more. It appeals to those deeper desires that we have for some global meaning that were satisfied by religion, but in a way that is dressed in the garb of modern scientific ideas and dreams. The podcast producer thinks of this mythos as a reconfiguring of pre-existing real experiences (lights in the sky in ancient texts). So for her, it's that only in the modern era are we now capable of transfiguring our old experiences in a form that brings it closer to reality. She thinks of the mythos as both true, and not true, at the same time. That UFOs are real phenomena, but that there is then a built up, transfigured mythology that has emerged around it. Regardless, I'd really like to look into this more. I'll start with Jung, and then maybe check out this Pasulka book.
I found the discussion of your symptoms interesting, too, as someone who suffers from chronic stress-related problems that manifest very physically (especially psoriasis which affects my skin and joints, and chronic gut issues). It is difficult not to worry about symptoms I have and go into some of those spirals, sometimes, even though if I could just not stress then I'd feel better and therefore probably be less stressed. But then one all too easily ends up stressing about not stressing...
Oh yes, I had gut issues as well! And, I suspect that some of my upper back issues are also from stress.
As for trying not to be stressed in this day and age... You had me think of a recent comic... ;-)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1-Dp2RWIAAVxTS?format=jpg&name=small)
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Here's an interesting looking book I'd like to check out.
Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect
(https://www.amazon.com.au/Escaping-Rabbit-Hole-Mick-West/dp/1510735801)
Here's a content summary from the Amazon page...
Here is a conclusive, well-researched, practical reference on why people fall down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and how you can help them escape. Mick West shares the knowledge and experience he’s accumulated debunking false conspiracy theories, and offers a practical guide to helping friends and loved ones recognize these theories for what they really are.
The Earth is flat, the World Trade Center collapse was a controlled demolition, planes are spraying poison to control the weather, and actors faked the Sandy Hook massacre…. All these claims are bunk: falsehoods, mistakes, and in some cases, outright lies. But many people passionately believe one or more of these conspiracy theories. They consume countless books and videos, join like-minded online communities, try to convert those around them, and even, on occasion, alienate their own friends and family. Why is this, and how can you help people, especially those closest to you, break free from the downward spiral of conspiracy thinking?
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the most successful approaches to helping individuals escape a rabbit hole aren’t comprised of simply explaining why they are wrong; rather, West’s tried-and-tested approach emphasizes clear communication based on mutual respect, honesty, openness, and patience.
West puts his debunking techniques and best practices to the test with four of the most popular false conspiracy theories today (Chemtrails, 9/11 Controlled Demolition, False Flags, and Flat Earth) ― providing road maps to help you to understand your friend and help them escape the rabbit hole. These are accompanied by real-life case studies of individuals who, with help, were able to break free from conspiracism.
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the most successful approaches to helping individuals escape a rabbit hole aren’t comprised of simply explaining why they are wrong
I would like to have this pop up as a reminder for users (sometimes including mysefl) on a lot of social media sites :)
I think the mythmaking thing is interesting here partly because it seems to intersect with both community and isolation in odd ways - and maybe needs us to rethink the extent to which we make those things into a community/isolation dichotomy, because actually people can in a sense be very isolated within communities if the structure of the community doesn't include enough lateral links. To think of it as a network, a centre-and-spokes network where there's a few highly central nodes but limited contact in the outer ring (say, a community with a very strong church and almost no other organisations and few external links) is going to be vulnerable to misinformation because it's very, very reliant on those central-node people brokering information to everyone else, whereas more lateral links across which information can move and more external links beyond the network make it more likely that there'll be other inputs going on and can create a broader sense of collective knowledge that has reinforcement other than at the top.
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That's an interesting way of looking at it. So the issue at times might not be 'isolation' in the sense of 'feeling lonely and wanting to connect with like minded individuals', but 'isolation' in the sense of a community's structure preventing a diversity of inputs.
Perhaps here (and I'd need to read that book) we have one issue with conspiracy theory rabbit holes. The more you connect with this new source of interesting information, the more you can end up shutting down alternative inputs yourself, by spending less time with friends, etc. So there is some kind of self-reinforcing / feedback loop there with respects to information / networks.
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Yes, that sounds about right.
I guess the converse case would also be interesting to look at: people who are very socially isolated but don't have any of these kinds of issues. I'd guess some of those cases are people who don't have such big stress/neuroticism tendencies, but also it'd be interesting to know if e.g. diversity of non-human information sources contributed to people being less likely to adopt conspiracist beliefs for people with few human connections: to what extent do different non-human information sources "count" compared to having varieties of human connections?
Perhaps here (and I'd need to read that book) we have one issue with conspiracy theory rabbit holes. The more you connect with this new source of interesting information, the more you can end up shutting down alternative inputs yourself, by spending less time with friends, etc. So there is some kind of self-reinforcing / feedback loop there with respects to information / networks.
This feels very plausible to me.
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Nick Pelling the Cipher Mysteries guy has a few recent posts on the related phenomenon of communities which form around cold cases and cipher mysteries: https://ciphermysteries.com/2021/09/19/charles-gazzam-hurd-and-the-somerton-man
OK, even though I’ve assembled all the information on Charles Gazzam Hurd in one place above, the stuff that actually interests me here isn’t Hurd himself, but rather the swirl of stuff around ‘The Disappeared’. For me, a much better question would be about why so many people are interested in identifying John / Jane Does.
Is this about closure, doing good, being helpful, connecting to (often long dead) people in a disconnected modern world? Is it about becoming interested in something, and then repeatedly scratching some kind of previously-unnoticed research itch that never quite scabs over? Is it about just finding an online community that you can settle into, safe in the knowledge that there really aren’t any terribly bad theories? Or is it about being nosy, opinionated, mouthing off, bickering, forum fighting, disagreeing, and occasionally trolling relatives and descendants?
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Thanks for sharing. It definitely seems to have some similarities.
In my opinion, the real reason people get involved tends to be something quite different: typically (I suspect) more to do with finding kinship in an online community than with an overdeveloped sense of morality or desire for natural justice. Finding Charles Gazzam Hurd’s family tree more interesting than your own family tree is all very well, but a dispassionate observer probably couldn’t help but wonder whether this does sort of hint at an awkward modern dissociation from your own basic reality, hmmm?
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OK. Another thing I have observed in trawling through UFO videos. So many comments from people who claim to have had a UFO encounter as a child. This is still the level of anecdote, but it feels to me like the majority of claims online are that they occurred when they were a child.
And I wonder if there is any kind of study of the ages of people in the past who claimed to have seen holy apparitions.
A few famous cases:
"The variants of the long-standing story of the Children's Crusade have similar themes. A boy begins to preach in either France or Germany, claiming that he had been visited by Jesus, who instructed him to lead a Crusade in order to peacefully convert Muslims to Christianity. Through a series of portents and miracles, he gains a following of up to 30,000 children. He leads his followers south towards the Mediterranean Sea, in the belief that the sea would part on their arrival, which would allow him and his followers to walk to Jerusalem."
"The visions of the Virgin Mary appearing to three shepherd children at Fátima, Portugal, in 1917 were declared "worthy of belief" by the Catholic Church in 1930 but Catholics at large are not formally required to believe them."
"Among recent visions, the reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary to six children in Međugorje in 1981 have received the widest amount of attention."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Jesus_and_Mary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Jesus_and_Mary)
Notice as well that such visions or apparitions occur often to groups of individuals. We similarly have groups of people claiming to see UFOs. It seems there is something to Jung's claims that groups of people can collectively "see things" that are not physically there. I am not sure how we could explain this with modern psychology, but I assume there are theories concerning it. Jung's own theories appear to assume some degree of transcendental / psi reality that we share (he is certainly not a materialist).
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OK. Another thing I have observed in trawling through UFO videos. So many comments from people who claim to have had a UFO encounter as a child. This is still the level of anecdote, but it feels to me like the majority of claims online are that they occurred when they were a child.
Humh, that is different from the classic take on UFO encounters.
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As for trying not to be stressed in this day and age... You had me think of a recent comic... ;-)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1-Dp2RWIAAVxTS?format=jpg&name=small)
Two things that really help me are not reading short-form news above the local level, and not following social media which tells me who to be ANGRY AND FRIGHTENED about today (triply so if the people they talk about are in other countries). Processes like the RU-UA war, or the fascist takeover of the Republican party, or chatbot technology, could hurt any of us in the near term, but nobody knows anything about the details and nobody can know and to the extent they can know they are writing longform reports themselves not being paraphrased by journalists who heard of the subject yesterday. And knowing the kind of things about say India which short-form news covers is almost certainly useless unless you or your family live in India.
Edit: also, like, where I live a full-time minimum-wage job pays the rent for a one-bedroom apartment if anyone is renting (nothing left for groceries, clothes, utilities, transport, etc.). There are lots of real things to worry about but the details of bad people in other countries or things that might happen one day are not.
The Guardian has noticed the connection between wellness woo and hard-right politics https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/aug/02/everything-youve-been-told-is-a-lie-inside-the-wellness-to-facism-pipeline A good keyphrase is "crank magnetism." Notice the paragraph about how many people are very lonely and form close relationships with fitness instructors or healthcare and 'healthcare' providers. Scientifical Americans (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35881684-scientifical-americans) by Sharon A. Hill also argues that ghost hunter and cryptozoology clubs are mainly made up of people who want a useful project to work on with other people face to face, so that could just as easily be organizing a film festival or campaigning for a change in zoning laws.
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Two things that really help me are not reading short-form news above the local level, and not following social media which tells me who to be ANGRY AND FRIGHTENED about today (triply so if the people they talk about are in other countries). Processes like the RU-UA war, or the fascist takeover of the Republican party, or chatbot technology, could hurt any of us in the near term, but nobody knows anything about the details and nobody can know and to the extent they can know they are writing longform reports themselves not being paraphrased by journalists who heard of the subject yesterday. And knowing the kind of things about say India which short-form news covers is almost certainly useless unless you or your family live in India.
This is a good habit. It's certainly one I'm trying to follow more! On the topic of the hearings, here's some excerpts from a recent Hill article...
The decades-long saga of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is barreling headlong toward one of two stunning conclusions.
Either the U.S. government has mounted an extraordinary, decades-long coverup of UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering activities,
or elements of the defense and intelligence establishment are engaging in a staggeringly brazen psychological disinformation campaign.
Either possibility would have profound implications for democracy, the role of government and perhaps also humanity’s place in the cosmos.
Importantly, a third explanation for recent events — that dozens of high-level, highly-cleared officials have come to believe enduring UFO myths, rumors and speculation as fact — appears increasingly unlikely....The decades-long saga of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is barreling headlong toward one of two stunning conclusions.
I. Charles McCullough, III, the intelligence community’s first inspector general and now an attorney in private practice, represents Grusch and sat directly behind him during a July 26 congressional hearing. It is extremely unlikely that such a high-profile lawyer and former top federal official would represent anyone making the kinds of extraordinary claims that Grusch is without robust evidence.
When asked during the July 26 congressional hearing whether he believes that the U.S. government possesses UFOs, Grusch stated, “Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over four years.”
Grusch continued, “I know the exact locations [of retrieved UFOs], and those locations were provided to the inspector general and…to the [congressional] intelligence committees.” Critically, Grusch stated, “I actually had the people with the first-hand knowledge provide a protected disclosure to the inspector general.”
It is unlikely that Grusch, speaking to Congress under oath, would perjure himself so brazenly over such specific, falsifiable facts, particularly with his high-profile attorney sitting directly behind him.
To that end, it is safe to assume that more than three dozen individuals did indeed tell Grusch of a decades-long UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering program, and that those with “first-hand knowledge” provided corroborating information to the intelligence community inspector general.
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4134891-a-monumental-ufo-scandal-is-looming/ (https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4134891-a-monumental-ufo-scandal-is-looming/)
We have here a decent summary of the 3 options.
I wonder why such articles don't make any mention of the connections to the Skinwalker Ranch ghost hunters, etc. That is strong evidence for the 3rd scenario.
However... I do also wonder if it is a mixture of number 3 and number 2. I guess we will know more over the coming months.
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One of the Skinwalker Ranch crew got featured on PBS Nova a few years ago with no hint that they push some weird stuff (I think this one is also a space tourism advocate).
I'm not able to form an independent opinion because I am not interested in learning all the names and connections, I just follow people who I respect who think that there are networks of people who believe that the US government is hiding UFOs or UFO encounters because they would demolish scientific materialism and who are pushing a sanitized version of their ideas in public to get support that they think will help achieve their private aims. Just like how in the Weird Internet Communities thread I quickly backed off from claiming to know or communicate the personalities and networks of the Oxford end of this space.
One thing which has come up is that due to compartmentalization, many people in the United States military-intelligence services will have been assigned to examine sensor records, or slag, or Russian and Chinese technology without being told what it is or where it comes from. If they start from the right worldview (or they were just young and romantic at the time) they could easily convince themselves that they were handing UFO sightings or remains.
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Here's a video by Mick West, who is pretty active in the UFO skeptic space. He goes over the pre-hearing interview of David Grusch on News Nation.
https://youtu.be/AvhMMhW-JN0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvhMMhW-JN0&t=480s&ab_channel=MickWest)
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That seems like a good overview but I don't have independent sources for the details and don't know the people involved.
I think I would like a long-form, humane-but-critical account of these spaces. Given the power of the military-intelligence nexus in the US, I doubt we will ever get a full account of real programs that might inspire UFO mythology (including programs to feed misinformation to believers to hide other programs). The CIA destroyed records of its Bush era torture programs and MK-ULTRA rather than hand them over!
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Yes, this is the tricky thing. The intersection of usual claims with actual covert programs means you can only judge the validity former using broad strokes / logical thinking, minus much in the way of concrete details.
One example: Mick West notes that Grusch got clearance from the pentagon to come forward and make the claims he did in the media and during the hearing. For West, this counts as evidence that there is no conspiracy, because if there was a conspiracy, the pentagon would not have given that clearance.
But for the UFO crowd, this same action by Grusch is viewed as a masterful play. The pentagon might not agree with what Grusch has to say, and might not want him to say it, but they only have grounds to reject his request if it poses a threat to national security. So, to tell him he cannot say it, would be tantamount to admitting that the contents was true. So, from this perspective, Grusch got the pentagon into a corner, where the best case was just to clear him say what he wanted, with the implicit meaning there being that none of it was true.
Depending on what set of presuppositions you bring with you, you can interpret the same situation in a way that corroborates the understanding that you already have. I do like West's more direct logical points with respects to the unlikelihood of so many crashed craft being collected though. This kind of more direct inference is more powerful.
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Because the military-intelligence nexus in the USA is so big, so convoluted, and so resistant to congress the courts and the executive, its also possible to tell a story where this part of the system is neutral or friendly, but that part is controlled by the Conspiracy. Between 2016 and 2021 there was a lot of speculation in the USA about which federal agencies or agency heads were for or against orange guy.
We have seen with COVID policy since 2022 how governments around the world can all implement the same policy without saying they are implementing a common policy, why they are implementing it, or what the goals of this policy are! There are other examples like the globalized nationalist far right (international conferences on how to seize control of the state and make the foreigners and immigrants pay!) or how the US government and Fidel Castro came together in the 1960s and 1970s to persecute gay people in their jurisdictions. Its not surprising that some people turn to conspiratorial thinking.
Edit: also, even though I have not done a deep research dive on this, I think its interesting! I just don't want to express a strong personal opinion based on half-assed investigation.
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Here's a new expose by the New York post (https://youtu.be/FKtI91TdRjQ) on the hearings, showing the links between Grusch and Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp.
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On online cold-case communities, I think there are books like Bill James, The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery, and Susan Jonusas, Hell's Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier
So those would be the equivalent of the woo-woo books and the books that patiently explain that the cryptid was probably an owl having a bad day.
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In fairness to the hypothetical owl, I too would feel I was having a bad day if someone pointedly mistook me for a horrifying urban legend.
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"Hi, I'm Jubal Barca and I would like to make the case for reconsidering Georgian chronology in the 830s ... no, I am not Spring-Heeled Jubal the terror of Norwich, the tabloids got that all wrong ... and Reddit too, yes. What, I was on twitter too? ... No that is not a brain pick that is my spare USB stick with the slides!"
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An old essay from 1964 that has some continuing relevance here.
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ (https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/)
I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy.
The focus of course is political, but I think this kind of underlying paranoia within U.S. culture is deeply interwoven with the rise of the UFO mythos, which is also originally a U.S. phenomenon.
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An old essay from 1964 that has some continuing relevance here.
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ (https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/)
I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy.
The focus of course is political, but I think this kind of underlying paranoia within U.S. culture is deeply interwoven with the rise of the UFO mythos, which is also originally a U.S. phenomenon.
Oh, did not know that essay was free online!
The USA is so full of real conspiracies by powerful people, churches, and government agencies that its very easy for Americans to slip into conspiracy theorizing (which is different than theories about real conspiracies: the conspiracies in conspiracy theories work differently).
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I think the bigger things that make the US an especial hotbed for conspiracy are around the lack of shared societal trust in just about anything - the extremely sharp political partisanship and high reliance on often rather predatory non-state institutions for fulfilling certain state functions (healthcare, etc), combined with quite high technical living standards and thus rates of information flow, I think are a fairly unique combination. If you grew up with lots of powerful actors telling you that you can't trust the government, and in any case it's not like the government does much directly for you that you notice, and you know you can't trust private business because you know how your health insurance (barely) works or have had to conclude it's unaffordable... it feels really easy for Americans especially to end up in a situation where they have already rejected all the standard anchor points for information in society?
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Some more interesting articles.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/disclosure/ (https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/disclosure/)
The dark historical roots of ‘starseeds’ (https://julesevans.medium.com/the-weird-history-of-starseeds-7df5127be9c3)
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The Daily Mail (!) accuses Jay Stratton, Travis Taylor, and David Grusch of having written the UFO disclosure legislation which Senator Chuck Shumer tried to slip into the National Defense Authorization Act (which authorizes the FY 2024 budget for the Department of Defense). They cite anonymous sources which from the Daily Heil does not inspire confidence.
Sources told DailyMail.com the legislation was drafted with input from former officials who worked on the Pentagon's programs investigating 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena' (UAP).
These include Jay Stratton, who headed the Defense Department's UAP Task Force from 2018 to 2021, his former chief scientist Travis Taylor, and program predecessor Luis Elizondo.
The most involved with the drafting was David Grusch, a senior intelligence official who later became an Air Force liaison to the Task Force, and has claimed to Congress that the US has recovered multiple crashed UFOs.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12860881/Congressmen-battle-disclosures-non-human-intelligence-UFO-bill.html
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I am personally disappointed that harpers dot org did not turn out to be a real life version of the Harpers (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Harpers), as honestly that feels like something the world could do with lately.
Re BDB's second link, I hadn't realised that there was a whole new wave of New Age pseudoracist UFO stuff coming out on TikTok. It doesn't surprise me but does feel depressing. I think I get particularly dispirited by TikTok stuff because the whole medium, not just the content per se, is so totally alien to how my brain works that I struggle to fathom a world that communicates like that. It makes me feel rather ironically, uhm, alien.
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Re: BDB's second link, I hadn't realised that there was a whole new wave of New Age pseudoracist UFO stuff coming out on TikTok. It doesn't surprise me but does feel depressing. I think I get particularly dispirited by TikTok stuff because the whole medium, not just the content per se, is so totally alien to how my brain works that I struggle to fathom a world that communicates like that. It makes me feel rather ironically, uhm, alien.
One of the rough lessons for people who liked the scholarly early Internet is that a lot of digital things in the smartphone age are not for us. As the Internet grows bigger, it becomes less like a cross between a university campus and a geeky convention and more like people in general.
The History Channel has been marinating the brains of older male Americans with less college education in ancient aliens nonsense for 20 years. TikTok can't do any worse, it just reaches a different demographic. I think that anyone who dismissed this as long as it was 'only' on a major cable channel and group of trade publishers but not in media that market themselves to the richest, most educated quarter of the USA population was making a terrible mistake, the same mistake which determined the result of the 2016 presidential election. But I don't understand that side of contemporary US culture, the sheer contempt that university-educated higher-income urban people and lower-income rural people often have for each other.
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That's a fair point regarding Ancient Aliens, though at least for me I find it easier to envisage how to deal with and improve access to better history and content around something like The History Channel than I do with TikTok which because the content generation is distributed and the content algorithm centralised feels much more of a hydra to try and even think about tackling. And I think I could, if pushed, make a sit-down TV show or a vlog, whereas I cannot fathom or imagine how to boil information into TikTok sized chunks, it simply isn't a communication style I can handle at all.
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That's a fair point regarding Ancient Aliens, though at least for me I find it easier to envisage how to deal with and improve access to better history and content around something like The History Channel than I do with TikTok which because the content generation is distributed and the content algorithm centralised feels much more of a hydra to try and even think about tackling. And I think I could, if pushed, make a sit-down TV show or a vlog, whereas I cannot fathom or imagine how to boil information into TikTok sized chunks, it simply isn't a communication style I can handle at all.
Well, if someone is watching TikTok or listening to most chatty media I think you have to accept that they are not really interested in learning in a critical way. They just want to be amused or hear what someone they care about says. Those media are like the guy in the bar who likes to BS a lot about all kinds of ideas.
If they care about "is it true?" they will look somewhere else.
Saying something wrong that people are ANGRY ON THE INTERNET about can be a really good way to get web traffic. One reason why I am confused about the weird Internet communities is that one of my heuristics is "never get worked up about a bad idea or person which you just know from the Internet, people who post a lot are mostly harmless" but then they started to get offline power behind them.
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That's a fair point regarding Ancient Aliens, though at least for me I find it easier to envisage how to deal with and improve access to better history and content around something like The History Channel than I do with TikTok which because the content generation is distributed and the content algorithm centralised feels much more of a hydra to try and even think about tackling. And I think I could, if pushed, make a sit-down TV show or a vlog, whereas I cannot fathom or imagine how to boil information into TikTok sized chunks, it simply isn't a communication style I can handle at all.
Well, if someone is watching TikTok or listening to most chatty media I think you have to accept that they are not really interested in learning in a critical way. They just want to be amused or hear what someone they care about says. Those media are like the guy in the bar who likes to BS a lot about all kinds of ideas.
If they care about "is it true?" they will look somewhere else.
I'm really not sure this is actually the case - I think a lot of people do look for serious information on things like TikTok. My understanding would be that a lot of people in some sense look for a sense of directness and/or authenticity as part of their framework for thinking about what media they can trust, and the sense of "this is someone like me, a Gen-Z/Millennial talking directly in their bedroom on a phone" is given a probably overly large up-weighting in the "therefore I can trust this, this person wouldn't lie to me or be distorting the important bits of the truth" calculation. That's then added to the fact that TikTok like other media young people use is often saturated with critical-thought related terminology, so there's a lot of cod-academic talking on there. And coupled with a certain scepticism about the traditional media as out of touch, and portrayals of traditional academia as likewise old fashioned and biased, there's a very fertile ground for creating content that people genuinely treat as worthwhile critical analysis and reads to them as the genuine article in that regard.
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I'm really not sure this is actually the case - I think a lot of people do look for serious information on things like TikTok. My understanding would be that a lot of people in some sense look for a sense of directness and/or authenticity as part of their framework for thinking about what media they can trust, and the sense of "this is someone like me, a Gen-Z/Millennial talking directly in their bedroom on a phone" is given a probably overly large up-weighting in the "therefore I can trust this, this person wouldn't lie to me or be distorting the important bits of the truth" calculation. That's then added to the fact that TikTok like other media young people use is often saturated with critical-thought related terminology, so there's a lot of cod-academic talking on there. And coupled with a certain scepticism about the traditional media as out of touch, and portrayals of traditional academia as likewise old fashioned and biased, there's a very fertile ground for creating content that people genuinely treat as worthwhile critical analysis and reads to them as the genuine article in that regard.
People are good at deluding themselves, but almost everyone has learned a skill after they could walk and talk and experienced that 'sound bites' and pithy phrases are cool but actual learning requires practice practice practice.
In Canada we have one-page papers distributed in fast food joints and cafes with a section of cool random facts. Reader's Digest used to have columns of those. I think that 30 second videos selected by a black-box algorithm are similar. They are meant to be absorbed with an open or agnostic mind, because there is no way to approach the information presented in a more critical way without quickly drowning it out in other sources. That is, the audience is expected to either accept the claims, or see them as fundamentally unknowable (whereas in a scientific skeptical way of thinking we ask "is that true? how could we know? what is the evidence? where did it come from originally?")
Two useful words for the kind of things that these sites serve are edutainment and insight porn. Insight porn (https://jakobgreenfeld.com/insight-porn) is a long-form type aimed at people with high IQs but collections of snappy phrases feel similar. On Facebook and Instagram they often circulate as images with a few dozen words of text.
Two other useful terms are truthiness and the system 1, system 2 model popularized by Daniel Kahneman. Anonymous unsourced short-form content is meant to be consumed by people "thinking fast" rather than looking at the details. Remember when Richard Feynmann noticed that things you talk about at a party tend to be things nobody knows anything about, like the forthcoming election, because if someone in the group obviously knew more about the topic than the others that someone would dominate the conversation. I think this law means that people tend to consume this kind of content on topics they don't know much about or have much experience with.
Most people listen to the pub lawyer to be entertained right? Maybe part of the fun is listening to the lawyer arguing with one or two other people who engage, but the rest is listening to someone articulate and passionate and provocative who seems like he (in my experience its a he) knows what he is talking about. Trying to engage in a critical, evidence-based way would be more work, and they are in the pub to relax and bond.
We all have to rely on those informal methods a lot of the time, but anyone who trusts anonymous short videos served by a black-box algorithm for selling ads will get into trouble.
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Hm. I think that's true regarding learning in the academic sense, but what a lot of people are looking for - reasonably, because as you've said elsewhere regarding print media it's important to note that not everyone can be a specialist - is not a deep understanding of the details of a topic, it's headline basic facts at the lowest quantity necessary to inform their own future behaviour. My case on this would be that I think certain sectors of people do rely on short-form content as a way of getting those pieces of information, and treat that as something for utility and consuming critical approaches not idle entertainment.
I agree that that's bad! But I'm not sure it's a kind of bad one can really just shrug off as "well those people aren't interested in critical thinking and learning anyway". A lot of people you or I might think of as producing edutainment content would strongly disagree that that's what they were doing (as opposed to providing accessible, authentic commentary on the relevant topic), and their viewers would likely feel the same way. My feeling is that this is a serious facet of modern media and thought-spaces that we're going to need to try and find a way to handle, alongside the many other issues poisoning the information flows in modern societies.
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I agree that that's bad! But I'm not sure it's a kind of bad one can really just shrug off as "well those people aren't interested in critical thinking and learning anyway". A lot of people you or I might think of as producing edutainment content would strongly disagree that that's what they were doing (as opposed to providing accessible, authentic commentary on the relevant topic), and their viewers would likely feel the same way. My feeling is that this is a serious facet of modern media and thought-spaces that we're going to need to try and find a way to handle, alongside the many other issues poisoning the information flows in modern societies.
Another concept I have found online is "someone but not anyone in particular." For about 10 years now I post and translate many sources online and provide many summaries of research, but I have trouble talking to researchers in slightly different specialties and I'm not photogenic or melodious-voiced and I think corporate social media is like the lottery in George Orwell's 1984 (it drags in people's spare resources by creating an illusion that they can change something if they just try a bit harder). Its also inefficient to search for the source of nonsense in audio and video format compared to text and people of ill will have learned to apply the dark art of nerd sniping (https://xkcd.com/356/) and Brandolini's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law). So someone else can worry about misinformation on TikTok but it would not be a good use of my time. Its far better to let people focus on what they are good at then to expect them to be good at everything kind of relevant.
Hiring academics to enlighten the public would be a good first step. One reason why markets in information fail is that people will pay everything they have to be bunked, but not a dime to be debunked.
Edit: also, IME you need to like a corporate social media site to do well on it. And learning the bizarre and constantly changing rules to get an audience on these sites takes a lot of time. So I feel like its best to let people who enjoy these sites be the ones who try to push back against nonsense on them. Just casually posting on social media does not go anywhere.
Back on the original topic, you can uncover the roots of most UFO nonsense just by studying books published between 1875 and 1960 (plus ancient Jewish texts such as the Book of Enoch (https://www.livius.org/sources/about/1-enoch/) sigh). And when you uncover those roots, all the videos and talk radio and podcasts lose their leaves.
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One of the rough lessons for people who liked the scholarly early Internet is that a lot of digital things in the smartphone age are not for us. As the Internet grows bigger, it becomes less like a cross between a university campus and a geeky convention and more like people in general.
Well put. When I got on in the late 90s, I spent most of my time on MUDs and Ultima Dragons usenet. Pretty much everybody was a fellow nerd.
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I re-watched this classic skit the other day. Seems relevant. (https://youtu.be/lTHB8iC1C0E?si=uC94aozF3yftTdKg)
I quite like this tongue-in-cheek 'last will and testament' by Philip Klass, published in a newsletter in 1983.
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF PHILIP J. KLASS
To ufologists who publicly criticize me, ... or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private, I do hereby leave and bequeath: THE UFO CURSE:
No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs than you know today. As you lie on your own death-bed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse.
40 years later, and here we still are. Getting excited over what somebody says somebody else told them. I guess it will just keep going on like this, over the generations, for quite some time to come.
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A lot of early UFO and strange creature stories came down to the limits of human eyes, ears, and memory. But the current batch are often centred on anomalous sensor readings where there are even more stages where things could get mangled and be very hard to track down. Some early UFO sightings were almost certainly US military vehicle tests which were not publicly acknowledged at the time, and details about how military aircraft are collecting and processing data must be even harder to sort out.
Photos and audio are becoming the same as more and more smartphones integrate 'AI' to 'improve' photos and recordings.
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On that point, one interesting debunking by Mick West was a video of a tic tac UFO taken from a passenger plane window. They were able to catch the details of the fight, figure out the exact time and angle of the shot, and deduce (with flight record software) the precise plane the photo was actually of. However the camera of the phone, when 'zooming', was resolving the plane as a simple tic tac shaped blob, because really the lenses of the phone cannot 'zoom', so there was no extra information to resolve the shape into. (The video in question. (https://youtu.be/nPGmUF6R3CY?si=io6tyJNOwhi1dfT3) )
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That article I shared before on the dark origins of Starseed thinking is quite interesting with this respect as well. I really recommend it. There's a certain religious / spiritual element, where the spirits of super naturally powerful ancient Indians (Aryans) were simply replaced by Aliens. Alien mythology is heavily cribbed from the alternative spirtualist / theosophist movements of the 19th century.
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Oh wow. The journalist at the New York Post covering this story (Steven Greenstreet) has released a 3 hour and 50 minute breakdown on youtube. (https://youtu.be/a6Wud0LzFQY?si=HcoM20nAe7bPtAyg)
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And it opens with verse! When a New York City tabloid calls sus you have problems.
The first hour of the NYP story does not make the New York Times look good.
I sympathize with research dives and feeling alienated, but when I look into the limits of human senses and memory, the figures involved, and the kinds of beliefs some of these people seem to be pushing, I have trouble imagining that anything good could come out of this. And one phone call or email to anyone involved in scientific skepticism would have given the NYT a heads up about many of the names in their story. A lot of figures in that space have died or turned into cranks, but there are enough who could run a reporter through the basics.
One very American aspect of the story is that Skinwalker Ranch is a random bit of the Southwest which a succession of shady figures keep selling to each other and trying to make money from. The name Skinwalker Ranch is one of those marketing ploys! Robert Bigelow sold the ranch in 2016 and the new owners decided it needed a cool name.
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I've still only just started watching it (I'll have to split it over a few evenings) but already fascinated to learn that Hal Puthoff was with project STARGATE. A great example for showing that 'the government' is not an all-knowing entity that operates in some purely rational manner. It's huge, messy, and like the general population at large, has its share of cranks. If you know how to say the right things, or get in the right ear, you can (historically at least) get money cleared for staring at goats.
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For comparison, Fat Leonard (https://apnews.com/article/business-united-states-san-diego-philippines-us-navy-f7cef41af83d98083a9f48629a2e3c5f) swindled about $35m out of the US navy by just plying officers with ale and whores (my apologies to hard working sex-trade workers for Scott Kurtz' insensitive language (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Scott_Kurtz) in 1999). When the US federal budget is in the trillions and full of corruption and secrecy nonsense will slip through.
Canada wastes that kind of money just having naval ships built in Canadian shipyards owned by the family that owns Nova Scotia rather than a Korean or German shipyard that actually knows how to build ships.
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At 1 hour in Nick Pope alludes to one of the supernatural theories I have heard of (that anomalies are the workings of a Trickester god, like creationists used to say fossils were created by Satan to confound the faithful). There is a book somewhere which expounds it in more detail.
And when you get into ritual magic, you get into people who try make false things true by saying the right words in a convincing way. Even aside from motivated reasoning, flawed senses, and people who want to make a buck or get some attention with a fun story.
Regarding 1:20, a number of Joseph Banks Rhine's 'best psychic subjects' were said to be students who got paid more when they guessed the right card (or at least got hired to come back) and had familiarity with stage magic and card tricks.
The interview with Brandon Fugal is excellent at showing how many people pushing weird stuff are pushing things they saw on TV and film or read in books and comics. It all makes me sad because I took a different path.
The amount of weird **** that is parables, allegories, or in-jokes from Masonry or Mornomism which got out of hand is another deep rabbit hole. You can very rarely prove it but its often suggestive.
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Travis S. Taylor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_S._Taylor) is described as a physicist and science-fiction author. Wiki says he is specifically an optical and areospace engineer. Cranks and creationists very often have engineering degrees if they have any qualifications in natural science (medical degrees are also not unknown).
I'm sure all these characters would be fun to meet but I can't help someone do story magic on unconsenting third parties or stabilize their childhood faith. I am a scientist.
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I finished the whole thing the other night, and I quite enjoyed it. At first I thought he was spending rather a lot of time time just talking with Fugal (current owner of Skinwalker Ranch) and his 'team', but in the end I could see his approach worked well for showing what these people are like. The key figures are predominantly fantasists (Bigalow, Fugal), but they also enjoy the grift. They like to think they are doing something extremely special, but on some level know it's all just entertainment. The capacity to hold those two conflicting attitudes in their minds at once is fascinating. One can be both a child and an adult at the same time, in different ways, in different contexts.
The intersection with Mormon theology was fascinating too. Greenstreet's own mormon background certainly turned out to be useful for this insight.
I found a related article on this topic.
(https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/09/05/matthew-bowman-why-some-latter-day/)
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The Walrus wants you to be scared of TikTok misinformation https://thewalrus.ca/social-media-is-warping-history/ which seems to draw on a trade book from a Big Five publisher: Jason Steinhauer, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Basically though, corporate social media are not places for establishing evidence-based consensus. They never were, any more than bar-room chats, cable TV, or magazines for thinky talky people were. If you wanted them to be, you would build them differently, and they would be much smaller. Knowing verifiable true things is an uncommon taste. There was no time in the 20th century when most people in the North Atlantic world were good scientific materialists, most people have at least one belief or practice which is hard to square with natural science. But when you are one-on-one or one-on-few with people, you can listen with attention, ask some gentle questions, and offer some extra information and often they can take that and step away from the woo.
If you want a mass-media-sized audience, you have to create mass-media-shaped things like big speculative claims or moralistic gossip about famous people.